What Happened? Islam Happened.

Three photos from 1956. A fashion show in Baghdad, Iraq; downtown Cairo, Egypt; a nightclub in Cairo, Egypt.

Today it is extremely rare to find a female over twelve years old not wearing the veil or the extreme headscarf, the kind that covers the forehead and neck. Additionally, the arms are always fully covered.

What happened?

Islam happened. Pushed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Arabian Wahhabis, who began stressing the evilness of women and that they must be covered.

But what’s interesting is that as the numbers of women wearing the veil and headscarves rose, so did the numbers of sexual harassment and rape.

Headscarves and veils increase sexual harassment and rape.

In Egypt, sexual harassment was unheard of before the late 1980s. But it was during the 1980s that there was a massive increase in the number of Muslim Brotherhood faculty members in universities.

With this change in the universities came the demise of treatment towards women. Young men were taught to harass women who did not wear a headscarf.

Soon after, young girls had their hair chopped off in classrooms, in front of the entire class, for not wearing headscarves.

The Muslim Brotherhood entered America in 1962. The first organization they created was the Muslim Student Association (MSA). Today, there is an MSA in almost every university throughout America. And with it has come a visible presence of the headscarf on many campuses.

For the last ten years, there has been an annual “Islam Awareness Week” at most campuses, sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood. As of a few years ago, a booth that encourages non-Muslim girls to wear the headscarf has cropped up.

I was traveling last week, in an American city I won’t name, but I was appalled that large numbers of women were wearing the headscarf and veil.

The last two Grand Imams of Al Azhar University in Cairo, considered to be the Harvard of Islamic learning, and where Muslims from all over the world go to study and become imams, have stated that the headscarf and veil are not a religious requirement. One Grand Imam even made a fatwa banning the veil. So why are American women wearing them?

Cheri Berens lives in Egypt and worked as a researcher for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture until 2012 when the Muslim Brotherhood took power. She experienced Egypt’s 2011 and 2013 revolutions and witnessed the terrorism that followed.